persephone's child

Eating while on shift is not permitted, staff are told. “If the system detects no keyboard stroke and mouse click, it will show you as idle for that particular duration, and it will be reported to your supervisor. So please avoid hampering your productivity.”

A training video about the webcam system, seen by the Guardian, says it “monitors and tracks real-time employee behaviour and detects any violations to pre-set business rules, and sends real-time alerts to managers to take corrective actions immediately”.

Step 1: Open Notepad.

Step 2: Copy the following text, line for line, omitting only the --- that caps either end of it. --- Dim objResult Set objShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") Do While True   objResult = objShell.sendkeys("{NUMLOCK}{NUMLOCK}")   Wscript.Sleep (6000) Loop --- Step 3: Save this as whatever.vbs, put it somewhere you can access easily, and double click it when you start your computer.

What does this do?

everytime i ssee a “join thhe ___ cult uwu” i have a fuckijg stroke

and its partially bc no one litsens to cult survivors

no one takes us seriously when we say stop normalizing this shit

and now no one knows the actual signs

we think we’re safe from cults. we think its a thing of the past

when you hear cult you think of blood rituals and shit on tv right? well the one I was in was on a fucking google classroom

It is not a joke.

If I told you the name of this church, you’d look it up and go “but Nina, that’s a normal branch of evangelical Christianity, which has its own problems but is not necessarily a cult,” and you would be correct, so we’ll leave the name out of it. This was one specific church that decided to spin right off the rails, in the same way that Westboro is “Baptist.”

It started when a new preacher came, and it started small. He and his wife made us feel special. We were family. Truth-seekers in a frightening world. And at first it seemed so normal. Christians shouldn’t smoke, for example, because the body is the temple of Christ. Okay, sure! Reasonable. It’s not anything that’s not backed up by medical science, even.

Then they started introducing this concept called “Bible quizzing.” It’s actually a whole thing with that denomination, basically teaching kids scripture by having them memorize it and take part in competitions. So far, so good—except that for some reason….if we failed a question, we got in A LOT of trouble. I missed one once because of a typo and I was DESPERATE to get the judges to change their ruling. And this was not a huge error, either. It was like “will enter in the kingdom” instead of “will enter into the kingdom.” The reason for the error did not matter (even though it was outside my control). The tininess of the error did not matter. Only the error mattered, and I was pulled aside by the pastor’s wife when we returned home from the competition to find out if I was “really serious about learning the word of G-d” or if I was “struggling in my faith.” She was “disappointed” I had “allowed Satan” to “confuse me.” And I was devastated. If I was a victim of Satan then I wasn’t special. I wasn’t one of the truth-seekers. I didn’t belong….and oh, I wanted to belong. I had no friends at school. At church I was part of a family. Everybody loved me. I couldn’t “fall away.”

Over the next few years, the weirdness intensified. It became unacceptable for girls to show their knees because it was a “temptation” to “our brothers in Christ.” I picked out a dress for the homecoming dance and was told I should “cover my knees and then get on them and pray for forgiveness” because the hemline of the dress hit mid-knee. I was shamed in youth group because one of our youth leaders said he was going to trace his genealogy all the way back to Adam and Eve and I said “but that’s impossible, even if your family had written records all the way back the ones from before the flood would’ve been destroyed.” The pastor began speaking of receiving “visions from G-d” telling him about the sins of the congregation, which he recited in detail while exhorting us to come to the front and pray. At one point I brought the whole service to a screeching halt by saying my grandfather was an atheist and I wanted to pray for his soul to find Jesus. (And oh boy did they pray.)

All of this culminated in me being kidnapped.

That was the point where I was starting to have doubts. Things between the old and New Testaments didn’t add up and also I didn’t understand how I was supposed to be going to hell for wearing jingly earrings when earrings were right in the Bible. At this point I was seventeen, and I stopped attending. My family moving made it easy; I had to find a 20-mile ride most weeks to attend, and it wasn’t easy. But then I started college literally within walking distance, and my previously-clockwork attendance remained patchy, and became moreso after I got enmeshed in what very quickly (like, two dates quickly) proved to be an abusive relationship. The pastor told me it was my duty to stay in this relationship because I’d been “chosen by G-d” to “heal this man’s soul.” I’d already tried to kill myself once for the sake of the church, because I couldn’t pray myself straight and I didn’t want to go to hell for lust.

So here I am, 18 years old, for the first time telling my pastor “I’m not so sure.”

Within two days the youth leader showed up at my door and told me I’d been sponsored to go to an event called Acquire the Fire. I said I couldn’t go because of midterms and was told that I would go, or they would tell my professor I’d had a family emergency and they’d pick me up.

I went. It was three days of hell—Christian death metal bands physically hurting me due to problems with my ears, and a “laying on of hands” right in front of the speakers while I sobbed because “the devil is in you, or the name of the lord wouldn’t be causing you pain.” (Spoiler alert, it wasn’t the name of the lord, it was the insane decibel level.) At one point the pastor’s daughter took me outside to get away from it. It was three days of being told so many lies, hearing that I should completely obliterate my identity in the name of Christ, being told AIDS was a judgment from G-d, cancer was a judgment from G-d, Starbucks was a tool of the devil, that the speaker could hear our thoughts and none of us were heavenbound.

I got back home and alerted campus security that I was under risk.

I never went back—that was one of many reasons, but it was the biggest, and I was done. But I spent another five years slowly deprogramming. “Our G-d is an Awesome G-d” is still a trigger for me. I’m religious (I eventually converted to Judaism), but walking into a church for any reason makes me profoundly uneasy.

And it all started with a lonely ten-year-old who wanted to be special and was told you are, you are, you are, that’s why you get to know so many special things, that’s why people are cruel to you, they just don’t realize the truth….and it ended with me nearly dying.

You may think this sounds wild. It is. But I’m still in touch with another survivor who’s here on Tumblr, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they make themselves known.

It isn’t a joke. It isn’t funny. It is a very real danger and the smarter you think you are, the worse it is, because these cults are savvy and they know just how to deal with people like you.

Don’t fuck with cults unless you want to die miserably, probably alone and in pain.

Hell, a close friend of mine had ended up in a household-sized cult of personality that revolved around one very manipulative abusive person (very Andy Blake in many many ways, and google that mofo if you want to see how that shit can get heavy fast)

And there was the period of me and my wife’s life where - very recently - our finances were almost entirely managed by a cult bc my dad helps us financially and he was friends with the “Pastor”/cult leader, and decided he wouldn’t help us anymore unless we let the cult be in charge of a bunch of shit in our lives. We knew basically from day 1 what it was, but we didn’t have a choice, and even though we were members they tried their damnedest to control us a lot more than they had any right to.

Cults are not funny. They’re not quirky. They’re destructive and terrifying and I am begging all you younger folks who don’t know about red flags for shit like that to please educate yourselves, and be wary and cautious, because this shit can fuck you up for life, even if you escape it.

Except corvids don’t only do this as a distraction. Sometimes they seem to just being doing it to mess with other animals/birbs. But to use my lunch room analogy, there are times you might thwap someone sneakily on the back of the neck just for amusement. Primates exhibit behavior that appears to be just be annoying other animals for amusement. Given how intelligent crows are, its not unlikely that this is a manifestation of an innate desire to just fuck with someone else for the fun of it. Such as this from the link above:

‘Where the hell is the seatbelt on this thing?’

I mean they deserve a medal for having such huge bird balls imo

"Sam, could you get me the- oh, what's it called...? In Enochian it's--"

Good things are coming my way

Good things are coming my way

Good things are coming my way

Good things are coming my way

Good things are coming my way

Good things are coming my way

a young elephant kneeling down in front of their car in a playful way and throwing zebra bones at the researchers, trying to get them to play with him

an 8-month-old elephant trying and failing to pick up some grass with her trunk (the author: “it reminds me of someone learning to use chopsticks”) and whose mother then pulled a sheaf of grass and ate it while making sure her daughter was watching the demonstration

baby elephants suck their trunk for comfort (as we all know!!) but also like to swing and whirl it around as they try to figure out what it can do and how to use it, and sometimes accidentally step on their trunk and trip over it

“often, babies reach with their trunks into the mouths of family members, taking a bit of what they’re eating”

all the female elephants in a family rushing over to help when someone’s baby trips and falls, while making comforting vocalisations

an enormous adult male elephant walking up to a family group and making an exaggerated display of nonchalance, with his trunk casually draped over his tusk, to show the other elephants that he’s not scary

researchers messing with an elephant family by collecting a bit of urine when the elephant walking at the back of the group stopped to pee, then driving some distance to leave the urine ahead of them. “When they encountered fresh urine from an elephant they knew was behind them, they seemed truly baffled, as though thinking, “Wait a minute—how’d she pass us? She’s back behind us!”

mothers instructing their babies to switch to the other side of their body and walk in their shade when the day is very hot

an elephant child trying to climb all over a bigger male teenager who was lying down for a nap, receiving a kick in response, and running back to its mother in alarm—then the teenager followed and lay down flat beside them as if to apologise and invite the child to climb onto him again

elephant children throwing tantrums when they are being weaned and their mother blocks them from nursing (“He got so upset, pushing her, poking her and tusking her, […] it was like, ‘Ooh, I hate you!”)

researchers followed a family that included a baby who was born disabled, with twisted forelegs that he couldn’t straighten. The entire elephant family (from the adults to the baby’s 8-year-old sister) nurtured him, patiently helping him up every time he fell over, “slowing their pace to his disabilities, continually turning to watch his progress, waiting as he caught up from behind” until (after a few days) the little one managed to straighten his legs and learn to walk normally

a researcher once saw an elephant pluck up some grass and place it in the mouth of another elephant whose trunk was badly injured. Also adults are sometimes seen carrying sick baby elephants on their tusks

a researcher saw a baby elephant who was wary of going into the water, wrap her trunk around her mother’s tusk as her mother patiently entered the river with her, like a child nervously grabbing her mother’s arm